MyHeritage and BillionGraves team up and launch international App

Groundbreaking multilingual mobile app will power international crowd-sourcing initiative

We are pleased to announce a new collaboration with MyHeritage to digitally preserve the world’s cemeteries.

In this collaboration, MyHeritage calls upon its tens of millions of users along with millions of other family history enthusiasts around the world to work with BillionGraves to digitally preserve cemeteries around the world and capture their GPS locations.

BillionGraves and MyHeritage will work together to make the BillionGraves website and application available in 25 languages. Along with other features, the BillionGraves app and website will also support Gregorian, Hebrew and Julian dates. The addition of these features makes the BillionGraves app the first of its kind to be made available to the entire world.

The BillionGraves content is available for free on MyHeritage SuperSearch. In addition, MyHeritage is matching it for free to its 27 million family trees on MyHeritage and Geni.

Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage said

“We’re thrilled to embark on this global initiative with BillionGraves. Gravestones are among the most valuable information sources for family history research, and although there are many thousands of cemeteries worldwide, most of them have never been documented, and their information is not available online. Time is chipping away at the gravestones and many are becoming unreadable over the years so it’s up to our generation to preserve them.”

Hudson Gunn, President of BillionGraves said

“We’re delighted to work with MyHeritage on digitizing the world’s cemeteries. At BillionGraves we are working to provide a comprehensive family history database for records and images from the world’s cemeteries—but it’s not something we can do alone. With MyHeritage’s support in mobilizing its massive user community and working with us to launch in 25 languages, we’ll be able to provide incredible value for millions of families and preserve this valuable data for generations to come.”

I just want you to know that having a “Leader board” and winning pins at the end of the month is a bad idea.
What happens is people start adding names and they don’t look for duplicates because they want to win a pin or be top banana on your “Leader board”. They have this problem on Find a Grave because people want to be number one.
So please ask people to check for duplicates, and if you find duplicates that person has to remove theirs because it was after someone else already placed it.
Thanks for listening,
Donna

You have a very valid concern and a great idea on how to make it better. We will look at incorporating this into our monthly promotions.

The ultimate goal of the leaderboard is to provide a fun and rewarding activity to those contributing. We certainly don’t want to sacrifice quality with quantity. That’s been our core philosophy since BillionGraves started- accurate, quality headstone records.

Hello Dermot!
Although we prefer the photos to come from the phones to guarantee the GPS, you can upload the photos from your digital camera onto BillionGraves. You can do so by using the Supporting Records feature as a logged in user. This will add the photos that you have and make them searchable on the website.
For more information about how to upload these records, view our blog post -> http://blog.billiongraves.com/2014/02/supportingrecords/